Two Roads
by Luna Jose
Summary: Drabble #58  Tommy-centric.  With two roads before him, he has always had the choice to be sober, but he's just now deciding to follow that path.  A look into Tommy and Andy's past.


AN: Wow, I think I have been sitting here for 2 hours straight! I'm loving doing little background stories for Andy. I was looking through my drabble prompts, listeing to Whiskey Lullaby, trying to decide what to write. Then it hits me! I want to do a one-sided Whiskey Lullaby with Tommy McNally and his wife. I'm not sure if we've ever learned what her name is, but for my story it is Nancy. No, Tommy isn't dead, but I wanted to show what he has gone through, and consequently what Andy has gone through. But this does kinda tie in with a few themes from my other story Cabin. However, you don't need to read that one for this to make sense. So, this is part of my drabble series, however I don't believe it constitutes as a drabble with it's whopping size. This is the longest one yet folks.

Prompt: Two Roads  
>Word Count: 1,080<p>

Disclaimer: I'm asking for Rookie Blue for Christmas, but so far, it isn't mine and neither is Andy's rant from 1x11 To Serve or Protect

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><p>Things had been good. They had been happy. She would smile, and it would light up a room. She would laugh, and the tinkling sound elated him. She had joked and teased and loved- his beautiful Nancy.<p>

But then his mother, bless her heart, had passed away in her sleep after hanging on for quite some time. He would admit, her death had hit him hard- dad too. And even in his grief, he had known what he was doing to Nancy.

For an entire year, she didn't say a word of his drinking. She cooked and cleaned and continued to work hard. She dropped Andy off at school, and picked her up in the afternoon. And when he came home drunk off his ass, she greeted him with welcoming arms.

But as the year anniversary of his mother's death approached, he slipped further under.

It had been his fault, all his fault. He came home in the early hours of the morning, and not wanting to wake her, crashed on the couch. If he hadn't been out all night, maybe he would've known that after cooking dinner that waited on the kitchen table for him all night, after tucking Andy into bed and kissing her on the forehead, she had packed her bags and left. If…if only. If only… then maybe he wouldn't be sitting with his daughter on her 12th birthday with the worst hangover known to man, teaching her to pick a lock to distract her from the fact that her mother up and left in the middle of the night.

He had a million chances to make things right. Instead, he spent every night out at the Penny while Andy stayed home, learning to cook and take care of herself. Instead, he left on the weekends for a night of poker with the boys and woke up on a couch not his own.

It was then that the letter came. Nancy wanted to apologize. She had run off with a coworker, and they were expecting a child.

As he read those last words, something deep inside had snapped. He had run straight to the bathroom, threw open the medicine cabinet and grabbed his trusty bottle of sleeping pills.

When Andy came home from school, she was welcomed with the sight of her father on the floor between the coffee table and the couch, the letter clutched in a fist. An empty whiskey bottle rolled across the glass surface of the table, and the sleeping pills not far from his hand.

45 minutes later, he had woken up in a hospital bed, the steady beeping of the monitor beside him sounding regularly.

And maybe this should have been his rock bottom. Maybe this should have been his wake up call. And with two choices before him, he again chose the wrong one.

The doctor had warned him. You only had so many chances. And he was slowly losing the opportunity to choose for himself.

Still, he was continuing his down spiral; because the very next week at work, he got into a fight with someone at the barn. He was called to the Staff Sergeant's office and quietly asked to resign or be fired.

When he came home that evening, his belongings in a box, Andy had greeted him with a hot meal on the table, and a smile on her face. Her smile faltered somewhat at the box in his hands, but then she continued to spend the entire night cheering him up.

Thinking back, she hadn't really decided to rebel until she was 15. She would dye her hair strange colors and wear heavy makeup, and date the wrong guys. Maybe if he wasn't drunk all the time, he might know that one boyfriend hit her. He might have discovered that another drugged her just to have sex. Maybe, had he cleaned his act together, he would've known how one boyfriend started her on drugs.

Sometimes, nights of sobriety would appear, some farther, some closer together.

But one night, she had sat him down at dinner, took away his drink, looked him straight in the eye and spoke. "Dad, I'm goin' to join the academy." Twenty-five years old she was. And she did. His little girl graduated from academy and became a rookie at his very own 15th division. And he was sober more, but his past continued to haunt him.

Then finally, he had hit rock bottom. He should have known it would come someday. He had known that one person only had so many chances. And He could remember the conversation as if it were yesterday.

_"I can't do this anymore- clean up after you." He had interjected, but she stopped him. "No! No, I hate it. Okay? I hate this sick feeling that I get in the pit of my stomach every time the phone rings, and it's you. And I wonder, 'what I hell happened this time?"_

_How had things become so messed up? "I won't call."_

_"Yes you will, because I'm all you have left!"_

_"You're my little girl."_

_"I used to be! I used to be the little girl you could hold in your arms; the one that you would take to the beach and look for seashells. I went to the same beach today, looking for bullets. Bullets! Trying to prove that you didn't do something terrible. I was hoping all you did was get blasted, drive to the water, and shoot your gun. How twisted is that?" She sighed. "This is all my fault."_

_"Andy, no-"_

_"It is! Because I've somehow convinced myself that this is normal- that you needing me like this makes us close, or something. I actually believed you had killed someone today. And you didn't, but we both know you could have, because that's exactly where you are right now! You want to continue living your life this way, go ahead! I can't do it anymore. I'm done."_

And that was his wake up call, because if anything, Tommy McNally was a broken man, and he wouldn't be able to stand losing the one thing that is most important to him in the entire world.

Later that same night, he showed up to her apartment, gun safe in hand. "I thought maybe you should look after this for a while."

He couldn't stand his daughter leaving him. So with those two roads before him again, he finally chose the one he failed to travel before.

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><p>I loved this. I feel like all the Rookies have this really dark childhood that was screwed up on so many levels, but I think AndyDiaz have it worse. I want to dig more into their pasts.

Please review! Tell me you like it, tell me what I could change, but **no flames**!


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